Who paid to build a solar plant in Arkansas for Google? Depends which page of the utility's books you're reading. Which is why Entergy and Google rewrote the deal this week. You're listening to The Data Center Daily on Thursday, October 22nd. After West Memphis: Elon Musk's ten gigawatt promise, Texas regulators pulling their own filing portal offline, and 35 billion dollars of Chinese orders for an Nvidia workstation card. If today's show was useful, follow us wherever you're listening — the next one will be waiting.
Latitude Media, untangling the Arkansas deal:
The criticisms ultimately came down to accounting: whether Google’s payments should directly and immediately reduce the plant investment on which Entergy earns a return, or instead count as utility revenue credited against customers’ costs over time.
The original 2025 agreement for Google's West Memphis campus came with Cypress Solar, a 1.6 billion dollar solar and battery project. Google committed 443 million in accelerated payments plus at least 83 million a year over a twenty-year term. About 2.1 billion in total, more than Cypress's estimated construction cost. And yet Entergy's existing customers got a new charge on their bills this summer. Arkansas's 2025 Generating Arkansas Jobs Act lets utilities collect financing costs during construction, through the GAJA rider. Roughly 33 million dollars this year. Meanwhile Google's money was booked as revenue, so it never shrank the plant investment Entergy earns a return on. Entergy says that revenue lowers everyone's bills over time. In filings to the Arkansas Public Service Commission this week, it said it wanted to “correct the misinformation and inaccurate reporting.” Under the amendment, Cypress leaves the GAJA rider when it starts operating in late 2028 and moves into base rates, so the plant's costs and all of Google's payments land in one bucket. Which, per Latitude, doesn't take the construction charges off anyone's bill. It tidies the ledger in 2028. The other half is growth. DCD reports Google signed a 440 megawatt PPA for all of Pattern Energy's Big Island solar plant, the contract the commission wouldn't let Entergy sign in September. Add up to 1.4 gigawatt-hours of batteries by 2028, an expanded Galet 500/230 kV substation and two 230 kV lines, costs Google says it covers. The 600 megawatt campus gets more demand, sooner: initial grid service in February 2027, full capacity by October 2029. The line that everyone else's bills will be lower than they'd otherwise be? That's the companies talking. Entergy files the expansion with the commission next, and says it'll follow the commission's transparency recommendations this time.
WREG in Memphis, with Elon Musk on Tuesday's SpaceX earnings call:
“At this point I would say I’m fairly confident of being able to bring an incremental 10 gigawatts of compute online in 2027. That would be in addition to the roughly three gigawatts, maybe two and a half to three gigawatts, that we’ll have online by the end of this year,” Musk said.
Ten gigawatts of “compute.” IT load? Facility power? Contracted supply? The unit matters more than the number, and he didn't define it. What he did spell out, per Action News 5: SpaceXAI is tracking about 200,000 GB300s a month for the rest of this year and at that pace next year. He called cooling a limiting factor, so the company is building cooling infrastructure that could handle 20 gigawatts, though reaching that next year is a small possibility, he said. Today's power comes partly from gas turbines across the state line in Southaven, Mississippi. Those are the turbines in the NAACP's Clean Air Act suit, the one that survived the Justice Department's dismissal bid, as we noted yesterday. Ten more gigawatts from where? Neither report says. On the ground, SpaceXAI is running or building at least four data centers in Memphis and Southaven, and a local pastor is leasing 800 church parking spaces so construction crews can be bused in. Earnings-call gigawatts. Show me the air permit and the interconnection request.
Emily Foxhall, following up in The Texas Tribune:
“To ensure all applications are thoroughly reviewed by agency staff to determine if they are related to data centers, applications must be physically provided to TCEQ,” agency spokesman Ryan Vise said in a statement.
Yesterday we covered Public Citizen's finding that data center stormwater permits kept moving after Governor Abbott's September 21st directive. On Wednesday, TCEQ posted that its electronic filing system for automatic authorizations, called STEERS, was temporarily disabled, and the portal was inaccessible. The agency also says it suspended the specific permits flagged by Public Citizen and FracTracker Alliance. The mechanism: a stormwater notice of intent goes into STEERS and gets automatically approved. So the freeze never reached the rubber stamp. And STEERS isn't a data center tool. It handles air and water applications and operational reporting, so anyone relying on those automatic authorizations now delivers paper, because the agency can't sort data center filings from everything else. Kathryn Guerra at Public Citizen: the agency's “rubber stamp worked so well, even the agency had difficulty stopping it.” Another critic quoted by the Tribune wants a real moratorium backed by legislation. For developers, that's slower routine paperwork statewide, stacked on ERCOT's pause on new large-load energizations, which holds at least until the audit report due at the PUC by December 10th.
Reuters, in an exclusive carried by StreetInsider:
One source said Nvidia told partners they might receive only 5% to 10% of the quantities requested. Another said the company had indicated it could produce no more than 3 million RTX PRO 5500 cards globally in 2027.
The orders, per people familiar with the matter: ByteDance, Alibaba and Tencent, more than three million RTX PRO 5500 cards at about 11,400 dollars each, over 35 billion dollars combined. Total orders from China top six million. Nvidia has told customers to expect samples in December and commercial deliveries in the first quarter of 2027. And it's a workstation card. B300 is barred for Chinese buyers, H200 goes case by case. So China's biggest platforms are building inference capacity out of the strongest thing they can legally buy. The supply-chain detail is the one for this audience. Reuters' sources say that starting in 2027, Nvidia is expected to devote much of its TSMC capacity to Rubin, leaving less room for this card. So the ceiling is Rubin allocation, not Chinese demand. TrendForce notes the 5500 carries a full 600 watt power budget. Back of the envelope, three million cards at 600 watts is 1.8 gigawatts of board power before you cool anything. Even a slice of that lands in somebody's data hall. Nvidia's spokesperson blamed “outdated US export controls” and China's own import limits. All anonymous sourcing, so treat the figures as reported, not confirmed.
Plenty of chips and compute claims today. For the model side, our sister show AI Daily Briefing brings top AI news for engineers, founders and investors every weekday, separating real capabilities from demo hype, quickly. Search for AI Daily Briefing in your podcast app.
My list: whether the Arkansas commission buys Entergy's accounting fix, and when TCEQ turns its portal back on. Mine adds one: whether any of those ten gigawatts shows up in a permit filing. We're back tomorrow, Friday, with more. The Data Center Daily is a Lantern Podcast, and we're glad you listened.